I need to restore coolness to my life (by alaric)

Once upon a time, I worked for Internet Vision. I started as a programmer, then towards the end of my time there, I was their chief technical architect also looked after the internal library (which I found incredibly satisfying). The technical architect thing meant I was involved in nearly every project, working on the design of the software and troubleshooting problems that the developers hit as they coded.

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Van! (by alaric)

Well, last weekend we picked up our van from Sarah's parents, who have been looking after it, and I drove it home.

I like my van.

For a start, all three of us can sit in the front, with Jean in her baby car seat in the middle, Sarah on the left, and me in the driving seat. This makes it easier to entertain her and supply her with milk than when she's alone in the back of a car.

Also, the van has manual transmission, which I'm more accustomed to and generally find easier than the automatic transmission of the car. I'm not quite sure why, but I find it really hard to maintain a speed with automatic cars... the speed seems to creep up or down unless I'm watching it all the time. With a manual, I get it into the correct gear, then just listen to the tone of the engine to regulate the pressure on the accelerator, and it stays at the same speed.

The van is more fun than a car, since you're sitting very high up and can see far ahead. The road seems to be moving much slower beneath you since it's further away; everything seems to happen in slow motion compared to being down by the ground in a car; you can plan further ahead and think about things more carefully.

There's a big comfortable soft steering wheel, hooked up to a power assisted steering system with an impressively tight turning circle for such a large vehicle. You can almost drive it sideways; I can stop the van with the nose about one or two metres away from a wall in front, put it in full lock, drive on, and end up parallel to the wall without needing to reverse. You can tell the van was designed for delivery drivers in London!

I've yet to do a complete test, but it seems more fuel efficient than the car, which is a surprise considering that it's a large cuboid of a vehicle with a 2.5 litre engine compared to a small streamlined thing with a 1.3 litre engine.. The car uses about 16 pence worth of fuel to drive a mile. It was nearly empty when I put about £45 worth of fuel into it, and it's driven about 240 miles since - but the fuel gauge is showing about three eighths full. When I next fill it up and reset the odometer I'll know for sure, but it's looking something like 10 pence per mile.

And, needless to say, being a van, it has a 'boot' ('trunk' to you Americans) about the size of my bathroom, into which one can chuck things without having to go to great lengths packing them down.

The only main downside is that there's only room for two passengers, not the four that can squeeze into a car...

Updates! (by alaric)

I'm being lambasted by distant friends for not updating the blog!

Truth is, I've been rather busy. A project (let's call it Project A, since I'm under NDA for most things I do) was delayed due to the required hardware being slow to arrive in the first place, not working, new hardware being obtained, Linux drivers being a pain, and so on. So it overran into time I was planning to spend relaxing, meaning I'm still somewhat worn out - and time I was meaning to spend on another project (let's call it Project B), and catch up on something I was doing nearly a year ago when Sarah started getting really ill in the pregnancy, and have shamefully kept the client waiting on for ages since all I get for finishing it is £500, and I've sadly had to invest my remaining time in struggling to rebuild our savings after the period of no work and expensive house-moving. Let's call that Project C.

In the meantime, I'm still being paid by the hour to look after Client D, who have a wide range of jobs on the go. TOO wide. Client D are a bit of a nightmare to work with due to the management being somewhat technically challenged, which causes all sorts of problems, but hourly working with a "to-do" list that grows faster than any one human being can do the work (I used to be full time with them, and have open todo items from years ago...) means that it's a reliable way to make some regular monthly money when I have time, and if I stay employed with them, I may yet get to vest my share options (which would come to a very tidy sum, if things continue as they are).

So there I am struggling to deal with projects overlapping each other when they shouldn't, while at the same time supporting Sarah and Jean; Sarah is still in a lot of pain so she needs me to help with physical stuff, including taking her to various medical appointments during the working day; and we've had to go to London a lot lately, which takes out who blocks of days at a time.

Still, I've now finished Project A. I'm now sorting out Project C and doing what I can on Project B, while somewhat coasting on Client D, just doing the things they really need me to do ASAP. This will cost me when I get paid next month, but I have some money from Project A now, so will survive.

And we'll go on holiday to Wales next week!

Of course, all clients want me to devote ALL my time to them, and get upset if they schedule a meeting with me and then find out I can't make it because I'm doing something else, and get upset I didn't tell them I was going on holiday. I need to find ways to gently remind some of them that I'm a freelance contractor, not an employee...

Anyway, having got that off my chest, I will now proceed to blog some fun stuff!

Lazy eye (by alaric)

I have a lazy eye. I was born long sighted and astigmatic in my left eye, and therefore my developing retinal ganglae and visual cortex have taken much more notice of the clean signal from my right eye rather than the fuzzy one from my left.

Now, opticians have always told me that this is incurable. They can set up lenses that make the vision in my left eye clear - I can tell the edges are sharper, rather than fuzzy - but still, thanks to the lack of neural development, I can't process the image properly. I have to close my dominant eye to see my left-eye signal properly, and even then, a pall of blackness from the closed dominant eye is obscuring everything; my left-eye signal comes murkily through amongst the blackness. On top of that, because the normal blurry signal from my eye doesn't have good edge information in, I can't see edges properly. Even with the optical issues corrected, the edge-detection stuff hasn't properly developed, and I see an odd hard-to-describe world of patches of colours and textures; yet when I try to concentrate on where the boundary between two patches is, it eludes me.

The opticians tell me that even though lenses make the image in my left eye noticeably sharper, the neural stuff will never get better, so I'm refused glasses these days (even though I have a hunch I might get less headaches with spectacles, since my left eye still seems to try to focus on things and then aches).

However, today I read this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4849244.stm

Apparently, VR researchers have been treating this kind of thing by putting people in a VR game, while feeding incomplete visual signals to each eye. Eg, one eye seems some objects, the other eye sees others. This forces both eyes to operate together, rather than the old patch-over-the-good-eye technique, which often ended up causing difficulty in co-ordinating both eyes together.

This fills me with hope. For a start, it looks like the optician's statements that there was no way of fixing the neural issues is poppycock...

So as soon as I get time, I'm going to an optician and demanding spectacles, this time with this article to show them!

Ok, maybe things are getting better (by alaric)

We're still a bit borderline on the financial side, but it looks like we'll last the week.

On the downside, my main server was down for two days last week 🙁 This was due to our ISP not paying his ISP, and being disconnected.

However, my driving lessons are going well. I seem to have mastered the reverse park quite neatly, so I'm starting to feel quite confident about the next test, on the 24th.

Work has been tricky; everything seems to be going wrong with the infrastructures I'm trying to build on top of.

On the project with the broken hardware, I now have new hardware, and the special PCI card is recognised by the Linux kernel according to dmesg and the set of loaded modules, but it won't seem to talk to userland at all. I'm currently trying to trace the problem down the kernel->hotplug->udev pipeline. I hate Linux.

On my ongoing support/development contract with Frontwire, I'm trying to fix a few old but annoying bugs in the Workspace software, but something's gone wrong with Swing or my X server - because all Swing windows come up as blank grey rectangles. Which is making testing a pain. I've been spending all the time on it trying to migrate the build process to run on the Mac so I can do it with the native Swing rather than X-over-ssh from the Linux box. I hate Linux.

Bleargh. Why must I spend my time dealing with rubbish like that, rather than actually doing useful stuff?

When I have more money, I'll hire UNDERLINGS to do this kind of thing for me. I'll make them wear boiler suits, and then I'll sit in a motorised chair wearing a white suit and stroking a cat.